Case Willoughby begins by recalling his experience as a Class Dean at Columbia University in New York City about eight miles north of the burning twin towers on September 11, 2001. He reflects that everyone in New York City had this horrible shared experience that made the city of wildly different people into one whole. The entire country was kinder. Columbia moved to support its students with additional counseling, academic support, and leniency on assignments and deadlines as everyone coped. Today, the world is in the middle of a very different crisis--the COVID-19 pandemic--and its impact on the world will be different than 9/11's. In this article, Willoughby shares some observations and reflections on the notion of grace in general, and its role in higher education during the pandemic. In so doing, he describes how his own institution struggled with ending face-to-face classes and moving to remote instruction yet everyone pitched in to figure out how to keep the community safe and how to continue to educate the students. Willoughby notes that to operationalize grace, colleges and universities need to scaffold learning and provide support structures so more students learn, develop, and succeed. He concludes that when COVID-19 becomes last year's problem and many educators return to comfortable routines, they can work to remember that many students are facing obstacles they know nothing about. Higher educators aspire to be agents of social justice and social mobility. Key in meeting these aspirations will be holding on to this sense of community and the extension of grace.